2026 Theses Doctoral

Traces on the Ground and in Voices: Dalit Pedagogy, Performance, and Place in Karnataka

Kaycee, Mohit

Dalit, or former so-called “untouchable” communities, are at a crossroads in Karnataka, southern India. Do they migrate from segregated villages to cities? Do they hold onto their goddesses, ancestral imprints, subversive language, sacred parodies, ritual and everyday acts of deference and defiance, and, most importantly, their connection to the land? Or, instead, do they convert to a new rational religion and embrace a politics of aspiration? Are the two mutually exclusive? To answer these questions, I look to Kotiganahalli Ramaiah, a founder and former member of the Dalit Sangharsha Samithi (DSS), an activist organization founded in the 1970s to advocate for Dalit emancipation and against caste discrimination. Ramaiah has worked as a pedagogue and children’s playwright in rural areas, where he has experimented with pedagogies that connect learning to the embodied experience of places and the lives of the communities within them.

The first part of my dissertation (Chapters 2 and 3) examines the journalistic and literary archives associated with the DSS and its founders to understand how the organization originally fought to secure rural Dalits’ access to literacy and land ownership and used the written word as a tool of resistance against the oppression and violence that they faced. This material struggle gradually expanded to include the cultivation of a more abstract sense of Dalit belonging through the examination of cultural memory through an attention to orality and performance. The unfinished legacy of both phases continues to haunt and inspire some of the DSS founders in equal measure and is reflected in the pedagogical and performance practices of Ramaiah and younger Dalit practitioners.

In the second part of the dissertation (Chapters 4 and 5), I examine present-day practices through ethnographic fieldwork. I begin by examining Ramaiah’s contention that education need not be limited to classrooms and textbooks, as he develops exercises to address both longstanding issues specific to Dalits and newer challenges that all rural communities increasingly face. I examine the role of performance in Ramaiah’s pedagogy as he writes a children’s play about intimacy with a goddess in the era of Hindutva and cryptocurrency. Finally, I turn to the Jangama Collective, which resurrects the voice and poetry of another DSS founder member, K.B. Siddaiah, who challenges the gods to transgress caste lines. Ultimately, my project documents an ongoing and intergenerational effort to establish a new relationship with land, language, and Dalit identity itself. A key question that emerges in the conclusion is: Does this path to reclaiming lost intimacy require creating a new relationship with old gods?